Couch Talk Episode 29 (play)
Guest: Sushrut Jain
Host: Subash Jayaraman
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Subash Jayaraman (SJ)– Hello and welcome to Couch Talk. Today we have film maker Sushruth Jain. He is the writer and director of cricket documentary “Beyond All Boundaries”. He is with us to talk about the documentary, the stories and the characters in the film amongst other things. Welcome to the show, Sushruth!
Sushruth Jain (SJn)– Hi, there! how’s it going?
SJ– It’s going well! How’re you doing?
SJn– Pretty good! Working hard on the film right now.
SJ– So, you started your career in Mathematics, as a student you came to The United States to do Math degree. And then, you moved to Economics and you became an Economist. And then, you went to a film school, and now you are a full fledged film maker, is that correct?
SJn– That is a pretty accurate description, yes!
SJ– How, and when did you get the idea for this documentary “Beyond All Boundaries”? and, what is it that you wanted to capture through this movie?
SJn– I grew up in Bombay playing cricket like a lot of kids there. it is one of the two things that you have in your blood when you grow up in Bombay, cricket and movies. As the World Cup was approaching in the middle of 2010, I started to think to myself and talk to my friends about how amazing it will be to make a documentary which is about cricket, but really about India, and to do it while the World Cup ws happening. So, I kept talking about how great it would be, when one of my friend said “Why don’t you do it?” And it then kind of hit me that nobody else wants to do it, not in the way I want to, so why not get it together, go there, get a crew together, raise some money, go out there and shoot and see what we find. That is how it emerged.
I love cricket and follow the Indian team as much as I can frmo here. We were excited about the World Cup too. I picked India. And it just made perfect sense.
SJ– How long before the World Cup was it when you started putting your plans together?
SJn– It was actually very late to begin. It was about September-October 2010, so about 4-5 months before the World Cup was going to begin, that I was about to make a go for it. the biggest challenge in these situation was to raise enough money to at least get the show on the road. Just, the kind of money you need to rent the equipment, to pay the people on the crew, the driving, flying, you need to have some money raised. That was the first challenge.
We had very little time, but we were successful with raising money with 2-3 months left. The biggest challenge was to raise money so we could get through production. And, having very little time before the World Cup one we decided, once I decided- basically it was just me back then- to develop the idea, make it strong enough so that you can pitch it to individuals and convince them to give you money – be it $15 or $20 and generate a few thousand bucks. That was basically how over a span of 3 months I raised enough money, put together a team of my cinematographer from USA. I was the writer, producer and director. I didn’t even have enough time to find a producer. I called up my mom in India and said that we are coming to sleep in the house and go out an shoot everyday. She said fine to it.
When I went to India, I interviewed people over several people over the weeks, in the film world –young guys who were looking to break into the world, hired an assistant director, hired a line producer, and went down the road there and hired all the local crew.
SJ– You shot the documentary in 3 main locations, right? You shot one in Bihar, one in the South and one in Mumbai. Why the4 choice of locations?
SJn– Actually, we shot in many more than that. But, Mumbai was my home base. That is where I grew up, and that is my mom’s place. Plus, Mumbai is the capital for cricket in the world today. The number of cricketers, it is the heart and soul of world cricket at the moment. And, it made perfect sense to base ourselves there. That is where we knew that, with the World Cup final happening there, we had to be there. And also, we wanted to go to some of the nerve centers of Bombay where cricket is played by young kids who wanted to make it to the top. And, we wanted to find a kid like that, from that world. We ended up following Prithvi Shah, who is kid of like the Le Bron James of high school cricket in Bombay. We knew we would find someone like that in Bombay. That was really good. And it allowed us to focus on that. We also wanted to follow a woman cricket, a girl cricketer, and Bombay has a lot of them too. We went around all the grounds in the city, meeting people, talking with coaches, kids, watching them play, and Bombay is such a great place for that. that was why – Bombay.
We also shot in Bangalore, for two of the World Cup matches. That is where we met Sudhir Kumar, who is the Super Fan, who we have been trying to find all over the country, but we weren’t succeeding. But we knew that he is definitely going to come to the World Cup match in Bangalore. So, let’s go there and stand outside the stadium and wait for the guy. Sure enough, he showed up. That is when we met him, and we told him “We are making a movie, and it is about you!” He said “OK, sure. Let me do my thing, and you can shoot.” We spent a week with him in Bangalore. At the end of the World Cup, he went back to his home, from Calcutta, he went on a bicycle to Bihar- it is about 600 km, took him 6 days. We followed him. We shot him in Calcutta. We shot him all the way over the next 6 days as he went to home in Bihar. That was going through some really back-waters of India. Rural West Bengal, rural Bihar, rural Jharkhand. It was pretty interesting.
SJ– Who are some of the other main characters. I also read that you wanted to capture a cross section of society on income group, like upper class and upper middle class etc, as well. I saw there was a Harvard graduate in there as well.
SJn– I think you are looking at a very old pitch for the film, before we had shot anything for the film. By the time we got to India, it became clear to me that the story didn’t lie in the Harvard graduate’s line about upper class people. The story was just not so interesting, and they are so un-representative of what India is. In terms of number, it is a country of 1.2 billion people and some 600 million people live under a dollar a day. That is a ridiculous fraction. So, it made no sense to find people in upper-crust and see how they like the game. Because, honestly, the true fandom and the true mania for cricket is in the masses, in the middle class. So, we focused on that, and we realized that there is where the really interesting and the dramatic stories were. We gave up on trying to go for income-groups and stayed on good stories.
SJ– Sure. But, when you may have originally conceived the thought of it, the hope that India would win- it was just a hope. But, as you would have started shooting, India got on a roll, got to the Quarter Finals, beat Australia, got into the Semi Finals, and then the Finals and won the whole thing. So, how did that play into your story when India kept rolling eventually, won it all?
SJn– It just made our story a 100 times better. All we could do was hope for something like that. But, we had basically decided that our stories are going to be about the individual characters and the World Cup is going to be like backdrop to the whole thing, which we will come back to in the movie from time to time, and keep telling the viewer what has happened in the World Cup. We really didn’t imagine that we would win the whole thing. So, when that happened, it just made the reason for the movie – now, if you are a lay-viewer somewhere in the world and you follow cricket, and you say “oh, this is a movie about India’s march to the World Cup among other things.” It makes sense now. We couldn’t have hoped for anything better.
SJ– You also interviewed former, as well as current players and commentators too, right? How did that all work out? What is the input that you got from them? You were shooting a cross section of the fans, and bringing out their stories. So, what is the role of these so called experts and players?
SJn-You want to always get insight from people who have been covering the sport for decades, like Ayaz Memon, and a bunch of other people whom we interviewed. We interviewed Boria Majumdar, a cricket historian, just to get to have someone explain to the viewers the scale of fandom for cricket in India and how it is really unlike anything else in the world/ we needed someone to articulate it to us, and we went to those guys. They also gave us insight in to the Indian society, we talked a little bit about that, why cricket means so much to Indian fans – it is very unique in that respect. So, we got a lot of great answers on those things.
With the cricketers, we wanted someone on the inside to tell us what it is like to play for 1.2 billion fans-the kind of pressure that you feel. We had (Sourav) Ganguly, Yuvraj Singh, and Balwinder Singh Sandhu, even Nari Contractor- old guy, captain of India in the 1960s. All of these guys talked about how amazing that kind of pressure is, and also how the sport has evolved. And how in some reason, in the last 16 years, cricket has evolved in the same way as Indian economy has evolved. So, we had people talking about that.
With Sandhu, who played in the 1983 World Cup winning team, said that back in their days Indians played not to lose, under (Sunil) Gavaskar and everybody before that. there was a brief period there, under Kapil Dev, which was to beat the other guy. He said that was the first time they felt that they could beat the other guy. And we did, in 1983. But we couldn’t sustain it because we didn’t have that quality of players. And he said, it took until the 1990s, suffering through till the 1990s, to see the new young talents that came out. And everyone around the world pointed out to Sourav Ganguly and said – that is the guy who changed the culture, that is the guy who said “I’ve had it with just being a bunch of talented guys. I think we can beat the Australians and the English. And we can think like that.” That marked the turning point. Stories like that, you can’t get that without talking to the main guys. We talked to Ganguly about that. he was extremely articulate about that. He was fun to talk to.
SJ– Did you talk to any current players?
SJn– We interviewed Yuvraj Singh right after the World Cup.
SJ– How was that?
SJn– He was on top of the world at that moment. He was the man of the World Cup, the no.1 player of the world that point. It was amazing we got any time to spend with him! He was good, he had some really intelligent things to say about what it felt like to win the World Cup; about what kind of pressure these guys were under during the World Cup. It sounded really intense. I don’t know if there is any scoring team in the world that faces that kind of pressure in any sport.
SJ– How long after the World Cup did you have to wait? You did have to track Sudhir. How long after the World Cup did your shooting schedule go to?
SJn– We shot for another month and a half after the World Cup, finishing all three stories – Sudhir’s story, we followed Prithvi a lot – at his home and watching him play and practice, and also with Akshaya – the girl we followed. Akshaya had her selections for the Mumbai Girls’ team. So, we followed her, her path and challenges. That is what we used all our time for.
SJ– So, where are you, in terms of post-production. The expected release date is May, is that correct?
SJn– I don’t think so. It may be a little bit later that that. We came back with some 200 hours of high quality footage and all that, and it is a lot of footage. We are trying to make a 90 minute movie which is what we are trying to do. It is going to take an enormous amount of time. Watching 200 hours of it itself, even if you sat there and watched it all, it would take 5 weeks at 40 hours a week. And, that was just watching it, and then organizing it, and then organizing it, and cutting it down to what is important and meaningful for the movie. It has taken a long time to get to where me and my editor are working pretty much non-stop on shaping the individual stories of the three people; and how to connect them all, and how do we put in all the other stuffs that is there in the movie. It would take several months, atleast three months before we have our final cut. And then, we will have to do sound and music. That will take some more time.
SJ– You raised money before you went to the location to shoot, and now you are doing post-production, I am assuming you are going to need to raise more money. How are you doing this, going after individual people? Or, seeking investors?
SJn– We are doing both types of things. We reach out tot people who we think would be investors in the film, people who feel that there is potential and are interested and actually putting in a significant amount of money. Those are the people we talk to individually. And, at the same time, we try a crowd-sourcing model. We haven’t done it full-fledged yet. We started at ClickStarter, we will start again either on ClickStarter.com or Indigogo. In the next few days, we are going to start a campaign to raise $20,000 on the internet. That would be through small donations. 100 people giving $20, or 500 people giving $40. That is something that we will have to spread on the internet world wide. There will be a trailer, along with an appeal to the fans, saying that if you love the sport of cricket, and if you want to see a good film about India, that is not just about cricket but also about Indian society, and about great characters, then help us finish the film. We are not funded by anybody. We don’t have an ESPN backing us. We don’t have HBO. We don’t have big money or big stars. But, this is the kind of film that is actually going to say something about India, as opposed to the next song and dance.
If you are an Indian and you live in the USA or UK or Australia, and cricket is an important part of your identity and how you connect, then this is the film. There is nobody out there making anything like this, and I can guarantee you – there is no footage like this that anybody has. The kind of footage we have will blow your minds! I want to say to those people – get on the website, go to www.cricketdocumentary.com, take a look at the 4 minute trailer that we already have there, and if you don’t feel like donating after that, that is fine. But, I guarantee you that you will want to, because you will want to see more. That’s the response we have had till now – whoever has seen the trailer, says “Oh my God, I want to see the movie!” We are hoping, taht through your show, through people who listen to you, through other venues where people hear about us, go to the website and make a small contribution. $20 is just like the amount you would spend on DVD. If you contribute to us, you will be credited on the film, and you will help make a great project.
SJ– It is not only the Indian fans, but it cuts across boundaries – as in, any cricket fan would be impressed by the story that you are covering. Especially, in the Indian sub-continent – Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and of course, in India. Any fan can easily relate to the story. You are on Facebook too, correct?
SJn– Yes. We have a Facebook page, like a fan-page for the film.
SJ– Thanks for your time. I wish you the very best. I hope you raise enough money to complete the film, and it receives the accolades it deserves.
SJn– Thanks a lot, I appreciate your time!
SJ– Listeners, chip in with some money to help out the movie as much as you can. And, more importantly, spread the word. It is www.cricketdocumentary.com . Thank you for listening.
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Episode transcribed by: Bharathram Pattabiraman